Google DeepMind hired the former CTO of Boston Dynamics, Aaron Saunders, as part of an attempt to push forward with robotics. Whereas AI has made rapid progress in recent years, advancements in robots have been less evident: In 2021, DeepMind’s robotics chief said the field lagged the rest of AI by 10 years. Partly, it’s a data problem. An AI dedicated to chess can download millions of games to study; robots, too, can train in simulation, but such “sim-to-real” training can work brilliantly in the virtual world and then fall apart in reality. Progress is slow, and robots still cannot reliably perform basic household tasks.
DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis wants to fix that, and to use his company’s multimodal Gemini model as a sort of operating system. His new hire’s former company — which was bought by Google in 2013 before being sold in 2017 — has developed some of the most advanced legged robots, and Hassabis told WIRED that AI-powered robotics “is going to have its breakthrough moment in the next couple of years.” The race isn’t constrained to the West, however: China’s robotics industry saw its revenue surge nearly 30% year-on-year in the first nine months of 2025, with companies producing some 14 million robots so far this year, according to the Chinese business-focused magazine Caixin.